The group’s fighters cut power lines in Falluja late in the day and ordered residents not to use their backup generators. In one area of Falluja, a militant said over a mosque loudspeaker: “We are God’s rule on Earth! No one can defeat God’s will!”…

“We declare Falluja as an Islamic state, and we call on you to be on our side!” one fighter shouted to the crowd, according to witness accounts.

Referring to Mr. Maliki’s government and its Shiite ally Iran, the fighter shouted, “We are here to defend you from the army of Maliki and the Iranian Safavids!” The Safavid dynasty ruled present-day Iran and Iraq hundreds of years ago.

***

Al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has been tightening its grip in the Sunni-dominated desert province, near the Syrian border, in recent months in a bid to create an Islamic state across the Iraqi-Syrian borders.

In Ramadi, the other main city in Anbar, tribesmen and the army have worked together to counter al Qaeda militants seeking to take control.

Officials and witnesses in Falluja said the northern and eastern parts of the city were under the control of tribesmen and militants after residents fled the neighborhoods to take refuge from the army shelling.

***

Fallujah’s streets are all but empty except for cars navigating alleys in an attempt to escape clashes and shelling on the outskirts…

“At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,” said a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety. “The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”…

In the provincial capital, Ramadi, tribal fighters have succeeded in ejecting al-Qaeda loyalists, according to Ahmed Abu Risha, a tribal leader who fought alongside U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in Iraq following the “surge” of U.S. troops in 2007…

When Maliki dispatched the Iraqi army to quell a protest in Ramadi this week, local tribes fought back. Maliki ordered the troops to withdraw, creating an opportunity for al-Qaeda fighters to surge into towns from their desert strongholds and triggering battles across the province.

***

Iraqi troops trying to retake Anbar province from a mixture of Islamist and tribal foes battled al Qaeda fighters in Ramadi on Saturday after shelling the western region’s other main city, Falluja, overnight, tribal leaders and officials said.

At least eight people were killed and 30 were wounded in Falluja, and residents of both cities said the fighting had limited their access to food, and that they were running low on generator fuel…

The trend began in December 2011, just days after the departure of U.S. troops, when security forces raided the compound of Vice President Tariq al Hashemi. Hashemi was able to flee but several of his bodyguards were arrested and based on their testimony, allegedly extracted under torture, he was convicted in absentia of various terrorist offenses and sentenced to death.

A year later Maliki’s forces raided the home of Raffi el-Essawi, a former finance minister who barely managed to elude arrest.

Now it is the turn of Ahmed al-Alwani, a prominent member of Parliament who was arrested at his home a few days ago after a two-hour gun battle between his bodyguards and security forces that left his brother and five guards dead.

If Maliki wants to know why al-Qaeda in Iraq is suddenly resurgent, and why violence is returning to 2008 and even 2007 levels, all he need do is look at this trend. Sunnis certainly do. Many prominent leaders of the Anbar Awakening, who allied with American and Iraqi forces in 2007-2008 to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, have now made common cause with AQI because of what they see–with some justification–as a campaign of persecution directed against them by Maliki and the militant Shiites who surround him.

***

Politics are at the root of some of the above – historical divisions in the Iraqi government have deepened during 2013. And not just between Sunni Muslim and Shiite Muslim politicians, but also within each group’s ranks. It is no longer possible to predict who will support who in any decision making power struggle. Whether Shiite or Sunni, each individual group seems primarily focussed on its own special interests. Only Iraq’s Kurds, nationalistic in their outlook rather than sectarian, seem to have been able to close ranks…

Many have blamed the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq on more than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s divisive tactics and power mongering. It can also be blamed on the fact that the Sunni Muslim group is stronger, operating with military precision and Mafia-esque cunning, just over the border from Iraqi provinces like Anbar. The past year has seen months-long anti-government protests by Sunni Muslim locals in Anbar – combine these with conservative tribal politics, thoughtless military intervention by the Shiite Muslim-led Iraqi government and Sunni Muslim extremists’ ability to easily come back and forth over the porous Iraqi-Syrian border, then the result is what is happening in Anbar this week.

***

Fallujah has fallen, and the same scenario is about to happen in the even-larger city of Ramadi.

It shouldn’t be such a surprise the place my friends fought for is falling back into civil war. I shouldn’t be surprised when the same thing happens in Afghanistan. But it still is, because I don’t want it to happen…

I’ll never know why they died. It wasn’t to stop the “mushroom cloud” or to defend the nation after 9/11. It sure wasn’t for freedom, democracy, apple pie, or mom and dad back home.

The only reason they died was for the man or woman beside them. They died for their friends.

Blowback

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I remember when the last of the troops were leaving Iraq and Obama was taking credit, Rush Limbaugh pointed out that they were leaving Iraq according Bush’s schedule, not Obama’s, so it was Bush who deserved credit if any was due.

FloatingRock on January 4, 2014 at 11:36 PM

Eh, not really. Bush left before realizing his timetable. Obama had the ability and opportunity to change that timetable. Obama chose to leave it as is. Not making a change is as much of a decision as making that change.

As for your “who is to blame” post, I prefer to give all the blame to the Iraqi population who couldn’t find it within themselves to mount a rebellion. Coups happen all the time and yes it would have been painful and bloody, but that’s the cost of allowing tyrants to grow roots and then having to get rid of them.

If you’re going to go on about neo-cons and whatever other things at least try to get the actual story correct instead of regurgitating leftist drivel about the Iraq invasion.

ThePrimordialOrderedPair on January 5, 2014 at 12:59 AM

Iraq didn’t have anything to do with the attack on 9/11 but Saudi Arabia and Pakistan did. Do you care that the US government never retaliated and instead covered it up lied to the American people and used propaganda to redirect their anger to Iraq? Do you care that the only people that benefited from the war in Iraq, as hindsight confirms, are bad guys in the Middle East and Washington DC cronies, many foreign, and the biggest winners of all, the fascist police/surveillance state?

There WERE WMD’s found in Iraq – the media just didn’t report on them. The rest were driven by truck over to the Desert in Syria just before the war started……and resurfaced in Syria recently……

Go ahead – LIVE in Michael Moore’s world, if you want to – where BOOOOOOOOOOSH is still President.

What a bunch of idiots are posting here tonight!

Didn’t they find some rusty mustard gas munitions we sold them in the 80′s or something? There was no sign ever found, as far as I recall, that he had restarted his WMD development. There is no evidence supporting claims that WMD’s were sneaked out of the country before the war, but it’s possible. Regardless, why would that be our problem? Saddam was no real threat to the US. Our problem was the a bunch of Saudi Arabians from Saudi Arabia, who received bountiful assistant from the Saudi government and, I suspect, members of the Saudi Royal family, hijacked planes and flew them into our buildings killing thousands of innocent Americans. And our government covered that up, at least important parts of it, and instead used lies and propaganda to redirect the anger of the American people to a war with Iraq on behalf of Saudi Arabia.

Could you imagine if, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR covered up Japan’s involvement and retaliated against China instead?

Iraq didn’t have anything to do with the attack on 9/11 but Saudi Arabia and Pakistan did. Do you care that the US government never retaliated and instead covered it up lied to the American people and used propaganda to redirect their anger to Iraq? Do you care that the only people that benefited from the war in Iraq, as hindsight confirms, are bad guys in the Middle East and Washington DC cronies, many foreign, and the biggest winners of all, the fascist police/surveillance state?

FloatingRock on January 5, 2014 at 1:49 AM

Hands off my Freedom Fries™, Frenchie! George W. Bush is the greatest president evah and HISTORY will judge him in a positive light and stuff because we have the attention span of gnats!

Could you imagine if, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR covered up Japan’s involvement and retaliated against China instead?

…And further, if he had done so, what if we all found out a dozen years later what he had done, that FDR had covered up Japan’s involvement and retaliated against China, would people who supported the war against China also be defending FDR, saying that China was a bigger threat because it has more people and natural resources and could pose a threat someday? OK, maybe so, but the point is that it was Japan that attacked us on Dec 7th, not China, and the government hypothetically covered it up and redirected the anger of the American people for an ulterior agenda.

It’s not just Obama that’s the problem, it’s Washington DC in general. It’s both parties and their cronies that have corrupted the government that are the problem. Obama is merely the latest and greatest, from DC’s perspective.

That would be “Al Queda” and “Iraq” – who’s government at the time was run by Saddam Hussien?

….as opposed to Barack HUSSEIN Obama…..”

williamg on January 5, 2014 at 1:49 AM

Saudi Arabia is angry with the American government because we wouldn’t give Al Qaeda more help in Syria. They were going to, just like they did in Libya, but the American people said no and they finally relented. For weeks they said they were going to do it anyway even though the majority of the American people were against it, but when people correctly started referring to the act of giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda as treason the government realized they couldn’t get away with it and backed down. They would have done it anyway in face of overwhelming opposition, so they themselves indicated, except that people were growing angry about it and that is the only thing that keeps DC in check any more, anger. And then when people grow angry at Washington DC, for good reason, DC calls them “extremists”, when in reality it’s those who thing giving aid and comfort to our enemies, because that’s what their cronies want, are the real extremists.

I’ve heard that Saudi Arabia’s Al Qaeda rebels occupy(ied) desert regions between the metropolitan areas of Syria and Iraq. So, yes, you are right that Al Qaeda and Iraq are to blame, but so is Saudi Arabia and the American government comprised of both corrupt parties.

Could you imagine if, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR covered up Japan’s involvement and retaliated against China instead?

FloatingRock on January 5, 2014 at 2:02 AM

Actually, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor we went out and fought frenchmen, first, in North Africa. I’m sure you would have been screaming that North Africa had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor (though, again, the lifeblood of the world was the issue, there.

As to your earlier comment about the Saudis not being held responsible. Yes, I totally agree with you on that. That was total BS and we all knew it. The Saudi, as I mentioned in my post, were the third major leg of the arab/persian/muslim threats to us (even apart from their deep involvement in 9/11 and Sunni terrorists around the world). And not only were the Saudis never held to account, it was only after 9/11 that mosques started being built here as if islam was going out of style. That was beyond insane and the fact that anyone in America stood for that cr@p shows the depths this nation had sunk to. It was only after 9/11 that muslims in America started bitcching and moaning about everything and claiming “their rights” to destroy us, basically. It was only after 9/11 that muslim representatives started displacing arab representatives in all media discussion of the middle east. (Not many people noticed this but it was an important point).

Yes, I was disgusted by all these things. I was disgusted that Bush didn’t take care of Iran (or let Israel do it) – which was his main task after 9/11. I was disgusted by the way we upped the msulim immigration here after 9/11, importing the America-hating savages as if there were a clearance sale on muzzies and we just had to have them (when part of America’s great advantage over our history had been that we had had about ZERO muslims to have to deal with.

But, part and parcel of all this is that the secular arab threat (led by the other Hussein) was almost as grave as the Sunni and SHiite threats, with the specific area of Iraq more strategic – both for the resources and the gulf, in addition to being the ideal place to be to launch the attack on Iran and to deal with Saudi Arabia from.

But … mosques were built (almost including one at Ground Zero), muslims were imported here by the truckload, and America elected an ineligible, America-hating, Dog-eating third world muslim-raised retard named Hussein … twice. That, by itself, was worse than our having missed dealing with most of the above threats. America, for whatever reason, had had enough of existence and, as best expressed by the mind-numbing moron Ehud Olmert, “We’re tired of winning,”, chose Suicide by Indonesian, and by Indonesian Muzzie, at that.

But, none of these problems detracts from the FACT that we had to go into Iraq. We won the fight in weeks and then Bush screwed up wussing around trying to win hearts and minds of heartless, mindless barbarians. You can hate him for that but you have to stop with this stupidity about “Iraq didn’t attack us” or whatever other silly sh!t you are going on about. Iraq was technically at war with us, had broken the cease-fire just about every day since it was signed, and was actively shooting at our planes. And those were just the minor technical features of the Iraq War. Iraq and the other Hussein HAD to be taken down. Period. Other mistakes don’t change that one bit.

As to WMD in Iraq, the Iraq War ended up turning up more big-time WMD than anyone had ever imagined. It was only because of the Iraq War that Q’Daffy was scared sh!tless and coughed up his entire nuke program, which included the first real entree and look into the AQ Khan nuclear black market, which was then shut down. THAT was more serious WMD than anything anyone had even spoken of and it was a direct result of invading Iraq. If Bush hadn’t wimped out there would have been more dominoes like that, but Bush lost his nerve.

So, stop with the leftist “there was no WMD” idiocy. It’s annoying and about as incorrect as one could be. WMD was stopped, and more WMD and more serious WMD than anyone had ever thought. An entire market for bombs, plans, machines, etc.

So a witness swears that he saw Iraq smuggling their WMD’s to Syria, huh? That’s your proof? Heck, Alex Jones type conspiracy theories have more documentation than that.

I have to admit, I was a sucker once in my past. Once. I supported the Serbian war, or whatever it was called. Remember that girl/lady who testified to Congress about the atrocities there that helped drive public support for the war? She was evidently a witness. In hindsight we found out she was lying. You see, she had a vested interest in getting the United States into the war on behalf of her people and had every incentive to lie. Pardon me if I don’t buy a lot of stock in so-called witnesses in the Middle East, of all places.

JERUSALEM (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that America would support Iraq as it combats al-Qaida-linked militants who have seized cities in the country’s west, but said the U.S. wouldn’t send troops, calling the battle “their fight.”

As to your earlier comment about the Saudis not being held responsible. Yes, I totally agree with you on that. That was total BS and we all knew it.

ThePrimordialOrderedPair on January 5, 2014 at 2:42 AM

No, we didn’t all know it. You and I may have known it but most regular people were not so well informed, and the government and most likely the media, took pains to cover up their complicity, according to the report I linked to above.

Actually, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor we went out and fought frenchmen, first, in North Africa. I’m sure you would have been screaming that North Africa had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor (though, again, the lifeblood of the world was the issue, there.

But Japan and Germany and the Vichi French, or whatever, were allies. We may have joined the European campaign first while we built up our Naval forces, but in the meantime we attacked Japan’s ally, not Japan’s enemy. After 9/11 we didn’t attack Saudi Arabia for their complicity, we attacked Saudi Arabia’s enemy, doing them a favour.

You don’t get to say that – and you’re not qualified to know that – you’re not Bush….

I watched what he did. He clearly lost his nerve. Not only that, but his second term he took a major turn left and sucked donkey balls. Bush never should have run for the second term. That was a huge mistake. He was emotionally drained from dealing with 9/11 and after and should have called it a day. Instead, he went on to take what was a decent first term (give or take) and absolutely trash it in his second.

NEWSFLASH: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!

williamg on January 5, 2014 at 2:51 AM

No, he’s not. Barky is the Precedent of the American Socialist Superstate. And a dog-eating retard.

I already detailed how Barky is responsible for most of the damage to our missions abroad. barky should have been impeached and prosecuted when he pulled that sh!t with the Afghan strategic review. Remember that BS? Barky didn’t like the troop number that was requested so he claimed that the Pentagon had submitted an obsolete report – he claimed that it took 6 months for the review to be conducted, so cuircumstances on the ground had changed (that Barky knew about but the Pentagon didn’t, evidently). Meanwhile, Barky hadn’t even talked to that dipsh!t, MacChrystal about anything in that time. So, Barky ordered a new review … that took over 4 months and served to waste a fighting season and injure our position in Afghanistan. And then Barky just made up a number of troops, ignoring the Pentagon.

Barky should have been hung out to dry for that, but … nothing happened. The retard was allowed to just break everything he looked at and then, most of America forgot all about it. I’ll bet you couldn’t find 10 people on the street who remember anything about that whole afghan troop surge fiasco or how Barky finally met with MacChrystal (in a bathroom in Germany for 10 minutes). And the really pathetic part is that MacChrystal was a big Barky butt-licker, too!

Not really. There really isn’t any sort of notion of “ally” or “enemy” in the arab world. There is no concept of goodwill in the arab world, and not much in the larger islamic world. They all collude against others on some things and try to kill each other over other things. That’s how arabs (and muslims, in general) are. Most Westerners have a problem understanding those cultures. They just don’t operate anything like we imagine for normal people, at all.

I disagree that Saddam still posed a serious threat but I nominally supported the campaign at the time on the condition that we would use our foothold in Iraq, which is centrally located, to bring the hurt down on other terrorist supporting nations in the region and fight an actual war, but Bush didn’t do that. In hindsight we should have invaded Saudi Arabia and seriously contemplated if it was possible to eliminate Pakistan’s nukes, but our government is corrupt and so it used the anger of the American people to serve the interests of their cronies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

This is tedious – it frequently happens with people in denial, like liberals and paulnuts who believe that they can occupy the minds of others – or that things external to themselves “make them” have certain feelings……..but, the same principle holds:

You don’t get to say that – and you’re not qualifiYed to know that – you’re not Bush….and, ultimately – You were NEVER there where he was…..

Finally – to repeat for you again:

NEWSFLASH: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!

He’s not responsible for “most” – he’s responsible for “ALL” – just like they made mmmBOOOOOSH!!

Yeah. I can go with most of that – especially the part about getting rid of Pakistan’s nukes, which was also one of the main tasks that HAD to be done after 9/11. I wrote a lot about that at the time (as India and Pakistan were busy threatening to nuke each other and I contended that only an idiot would try to stop them :) ).

As to your last clause … we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that particular part. I think it was more involved than you give credit for, but that’s just where we split on it.

I’m glad we agree on that. Might you also agree that Saddam was a secondary threat in the region that was mostly contained, while Islamic fundamentalism and Pakistan’s nukes are the bigger threats to the world?

Look at it this way, do you have a great amount of fear that Syria is going to attack the US with their WMDs? We just threatened war on Assad not too long ago, yet I don’t lay awake at night worrying about Assad attacking the US, nor was I worried about Saddam, as much as I hated him. Why hasn’t Assad already given a bunch of WMD’s to terrorists to attack the US and/or Europe? It’s because the civilized countries of the world might just decide that they would like to continue to exist and that Islam isn’t compatible with the modern world. It’s religious extremism that is the real threat, and Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest sponsors around the world, probably the biggest.

If Assad gave WMD’s to jihadis, once they got their hands on them they’d probably use them. Assad has WMD’s, and there is no shortage of jihadis to give them to, so apparently he hasn’t. Assad seems to be a rational entity that, as bad as he is, at least he seems to lead a more pluralistic society than Saudi Arabia does. It’s religious extremists that are the bigger threat because many of them are irrational.

And if they do have WMD’s and haven’t used them then maybe it means that even the religious extremists aren’t as irrational as they claim to be, so perhaps the human race may survive after all, thanks to MAD. And in that case we don’t have to turn our society into a fascist police and surveillance state and can quit fighting wars for multinational cronies.

I suppose you’ve gone to bed. Have a good night, I’ve enjoyed the debate.

A closing thought, not to anybody in particular:
MAD only works if it’s overt, especially in the case of asymmetrical warfare. If I were president I would make sure the Islamic world knows that if our way of life is ever threatened again and there’s another attack that we’re going to make the world safe for our way of life again, we’re going to continue to exist and be free, regardless of the cost to the Islamic world, should they force us to extract it. If that angers the Islamic world and they want a war, alrighty then. Maybe first I’d carpet bomb Mecha and Medina with flyers indicating that this was just a warning. After an initial period I would quietly phase out all the airport security and go back to the way it used to be when America was still a free country, perhaps with the addition of bomb sniffing dogs at the airports, but probably not even that. No crony enriching scanners that don’t work and erode our rights. And if they blow up a plane or fly it into a building, I would retaliate a hundred fold and make Jihadi’s everywhere regret it. I would try to target sites important to Jihadis if there is a small scale attack, but if they nuke a city I might consider, for example, wiping out whichever branch of Islam is most responsible. They try to destroy our way of life, we’ll destroy theirs in a reciprocal arrangement. No more games. No hiding behind magic curtains in which we pretend like it’s impossible for us to eliminate Jihad and preserve our way of life the old fashioned way.

That’s how MAD works, and it does work. It sounds so brutal and un-PC, and I don’t want to be. I’m not a brutal person but I don’t want to live in a fascist police and surveillance state, either, especially one in which the Saudi Jihadi’s have more connections in Washington DC than the American people do. And if you don’t want to live in a totalitarian world, either, then we need to employ MAD with these terrorists. In my own small way, I just did. Now maybe some terrorist sypathizer is reading this and knows that my sentiment still exists in America and that if they press us, perhaps the sleeping giant will wake up. MAD is a whole lot cheaper for the American people, too, we can cut way back on the spending on the police/surveillance state and save a lot of money and still be safe. We can eliminate a lot of generational theft. The only losers will be crony elitists in Washington DC, many of whom aren’t even Americans.

Only Iraq’s Kurds, nationalistic in their outlook rather than sectarian, seem to have been able to close ranks…

Now after WWI the Kurds were promised Kurdistan via a number of treaties and the Turks upset the apple cart by not wanting a Kurdish State in their back yard. Iran was a bit antsy, as well, as the last effective leader of Muslims came from the Kurds. Arabs remember the same. And yet the Kurds shield a generally pacifist religion inside their own territory and even took the symbol of it in respect for them – they are the Yezidi, and while they can be accused of devil worship it is that strange sort in which you have to mollify evil to let good things happen.

Say, did anyone ever mention how screwed up the ME is?

Be that as it may, the Kurds have a long, long memory and a very tight affiliation with their fellow Kurds in Iran, Turkey (where by 2050 you will have a majority Kurd population) and this little place called ‘Syria’.

Fast-forward to today and you have:
- Kurds standing together cohesively inside Iraq

- Kurds being a major PITA to Iran and if they ever teamed up with the Baluchs, you could pretty much get rid of the regime in a year

- Kurds on track to become the majority population in Turkey and having forced back laws that tried to outlaw their native tongue in Turkey

- And now in Syria you have the Eastern Province as the only place with a bit of cohesion to it because it has a decent sized Kurdish population

What was it that, ethnically, the Turks, Arabs and Persians feared?

Kurdistan.

What looks to be forming up over the next decade?

Unite the Eastern part of Syria with the Kurds in Iraq, which starts to change the balance of power in Iraq with more Sunnis, but ones who don’t think much of any sort of sectarian terrorism. That power in the Eastern part of Syria was gained by gun smuggling to Kurds in Syria by Kurds in Iraq. Don’t ask me who paid for them, but the Iraqi government was PO’d by it.

The current Islamist take-over in Turkey is facing demographic decline and much of what is south eastern Turkey is majority Kurd today, and that spreads over time. Kurds have shown their ability to work with other neighboring ethnic populations that Turkey has repressed via genocide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Something will give in Turkey and it isn’t based on religion, but on nation: Kurds are not Turks and will not be assimilated into the Turkish culture. With a much freer Kurdish region on the southern border of Turkey, any attempt to go after the Kurds will then face gun smuggling across a much wider border. Turkey, as we have known it, is not long for this world as a Nation-State with its current borders.

In Iran the Mullahs have had a very difficult time putting down Kurdish separatism. That feeling is unlikely to decrease with a demonstration by Kurds that they can break away from an established Nation (Syria), run their territories peacefully (Iraq), and force major concessions from a power Nation to stop forced assimilation (Turkey). With other neighboring minority populations the Kurds have worked with them in Iran and that is something that is cultural, not religious. A strengthened Kurdish region in Iraq or a start of a Lesser Kurdistan will start to challenge the Mullahs with arms flowing not just to Kurds but other minorities in the northwest of Iran.

The dream of Kurdistan is not only NOT dead, it is coming to be a reality before our very eyes, and yet no one will really acknowledge that when Nation-States are in collapse, a very cohesive ethnic population that understands what Nations are and how a good State can be formed to combat barbarism becomes extremely appealing. And workable as a Nation-State apparatus.

If you think the ME is screwed up NOW, just wait for the birth of a nascent Kurdistan: the militarily capable ethnicity that hates terrorism, respects other religions and aspires to a western middle class life. When you see the neighborhoods they created during the time of Saddam being unable to enforce his will after Desert Storm, you would not see them out of place in any US suburb and actually better than places in Detroit.

I do not like many aspects of the shame culture of the Kurds, this is true, but when I see the path of barbarism of the extreme Sunni and Shia groups that are cowing peoples in the region trying to spread the flames of social decay and war, I do have to ask: which is more likely to be able to be civilized as an aspect of their culture? The extremists are presenting barbaric control, not even true warlords, just factional fighters, and repression and forced assimilation by rape. They are terrorists and know nothing of civilized Nations that they like, and hold themselves to be the one and only law. Pirates, brigands, armies of thieves, terrorists… all of one stripe. Now when you see a culture that understands Nations, understands a proper military, arms themselves for self-defense not aggression, and while having some rather nasty cultural artifacts, is actually able to sit down and reason with itself on how to implement laws, which do you prefer?

And yet Kurds do remember a time when they were the ones who led Islamic powers, and who was a child of Kurdish culture. A culture that remains to this day amongst its peoples. You might have heard of that leader.

Saladin.

The Persians, Arabs and Turks do, that’s for sure.

Admired and feared.

Keep on looking away and in a decade you just may have a ME that Obama can’t even begin to see and that the MFM is doing everything in its power to distract you from. Rome understood that soldiers are superior to ‘warriors’. Terrorists are ‘warriors’ by that measure. Kurds breed soldiers. So did Sparta. And Athens. Rome as well. I know what history tells me about such situations. It isn’t pretty, yes, but it might actually be better than the screwed up situation that now exists… and that is truly frightening.

As to WMD in Iraq, the Iraq War ended up turning up more big-time WMD than anyone had ever imagined. It was only because of the Iraq War that Q’Daffy was scared sh!tless and coughed up his entire nuke program, which included the first real entree and look into the AQ Khan nuclear black market, which was then shut down. THAT was more serious WMD than anything anyone had even spoken of and it was a direct result of invading Iraq. If Bush hadn’t wimped out there would have been more dominoes like that, but Bush lost his nerve.

So, stop with the leftist “there was no WMD” idiocy. It’s annoying and about as incorrect as one could be. WMD was stopped, and more WMD and more serious WMD than anyone had ever thought. An entire market for bombs, plans, machines, etc.

ThePrimordialOrderedPair on January 5, 2014 at 2:47 AM

Excellent post.
As to the wmd factor as long as poisonous gas is still a wmd there was plenty of it in Iraq.
As previously noted it was trucked into Syria shown by CIA satellite photos. The Russians had a hand in it as well.
A lot of the wmds were flown from Iraq by two planes a 707 and 727 with seats removed by Saddam Air Force General Georges Sada.
Numerous flights by the two planes were made into Damascus and then offloaded into places that US troops presently monitor from turkey today!!
So enough with the no wmd’s in Iraq.
Sada then came to the US went on every major talk show from Hannity on down explaining the wmd’s and his role in transferring them to Syria. This brave man even went before Congress. Anyone claiming that there was no poison gas simply ignores history.

………….Why hasn’t Assad already given a bunch of WMD’s to terrorists to attack the US and/or Europe? It’s because the civilized countries of the world might just decide that they would like to continue to exist and that Islam isn’t compatible with the modern world. It’s religious extremism that is the real threat, and Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest sponsors around the world, probably the biggest.

FloatingRock on January 5, 2014 at 3:31 AM

Now we are getting to the core of the problem which is religious extremism. Nothing new here. Just overlooked and ignored. It’s still sunni vs shia,little new here. Still who can be the most whacky when it comes to sharia loving goon squads. Soon playing at a neighborhood near you.

Our govt has been creating an leaving messes behind since Viet Nam. We need to stop stirring pots when we don’t understand the ingredients or anything else about cooking. Our foreign policies change with the political winds. Let Israel sort it out. They seem to have the handle on the area.

Look I have probably returned late to this discussion, but I would like the next president to be a Republican. That is not going to happen if the Republican Party keeps going on about wonderful the Iraq War was and how if we had just stayed for another hundred years maybe things would have turned out all right.

Now is this is great winning presidential election message?

Dang that Obama for getting us out of Iraq. We Republicans would have kept us in Iraq! And we are proud of it! Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

And establishment Republicans always say the Tea Party says stupid stuff…there is nothing dumber than saying “I can’t wait to do another Iraq”.